Wenge Rong


2022

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Mixture of Attention Heads: Selecting Attention Heads Per Token
Xiaofeng Zhang | Yikang Shen | Zeyu Huang | Jie Zhou | Wenge Rong | Zhang Xiong
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks have been proposed as an efficient way to scale up model capacity and implement conditional computing. However, the study of MoE components mostly focused on the feedforward layer in Transformer architecture. This paper proposes the Mixture of Attention Heads (MoA), a new architecture that combines multi-head attention with the MoE mechanism. MoA includes a set of attention heads that each has its own set of parameters. Given an input, a router dynamically selects a subset of k attention heads per token. This conditional computation schema allows MoA to achieve stronger performance than the standard multi-head attention layer. Furthermore, the sparsely gated MoA can easily scale up the number of attention heads and the number of parameters while preserving computational efficiency. Despite performance improvements, MoA also automatically differentiates heads’ utilities, providing a new perspective to discuss the model’s interpretability. We conducted experiments on several important tasks, including Machine Translation and Masked Language Modeling. Experiments have shown promising results on several tasks against strong baselines that involve large and very deep models.

2021

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Enhancing Dual-Encoders with Question and Answer Cross-Embeddings for Answer Retrieval
Yanmeng Wang | Jun Bai | Ye Wang | Jianfei Zhang | Wenge Rong | Zongcheng Ji | Shaojun Wang | Jing Xiao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Dual-Encoders is a promising mechanism for answer retrieval in question answering (QA) systems. Currently most conventional Dual-Encoders learn the semantic representations of questions and answers merely through matching score. Researchers proposed to introduce the QA interaction features in scoring function but at the cost of low efficiency in inference stage. To keep independent encoding of questions and answers during inference stage, variational auto-encoder is further introduced to reconstruct answers (questions) from question (answer) embeddings as an auxiliary task to enhance QA interaction in representation learning in training stage. However, the needs of text generation and answer retrieval are different, which leads to hardness in training. In this work, we propose a framework to enhance the Dual-Encoders model with question answer cross-embeddings and a novel Geometry Alignment Mechanism (GAM) to align the geometry of embeddings from Dual-Encoders with that from Cross-Encoders. Extensive experimental results show that our framework significantly improves Dual-Encoders model and outperforms the state-of-the-art method on multiple answer retrieval datasets.

2019

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Sequential Attention with Keyword Mask Model for Community-based Question Answering
Jianxin Yang | Wenge Rong | Libin Shi | Zhang Xiong
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

In Community-based Question Answering system(CQA), Answer Selection(AS) is a critical task, which focuses on finding a suitable answer within a list of candidate answers. For neural network models, the key issue is how to model the representations of QA text pairs and calculate the interactions between them. We propose a Sequential Attention with Keyword Mask model(SAKM) for CQA to imitate human reading behavior. Question and answer text regard each other as context within keyword-mask attention when encoding the representations, and repeat multiple times(hops) in a sequential style. So the QA pairs capture features and information from both question text and answer text, interacting and improving vector representations iteratively through hops. The flexibility of the model allows to extract meaningful keywords from the sentences and enhance diverse mutual information. We perform on answer selection tasks and multi-level answer ranking tasks. Experiment results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model on community-based QA datasets.

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Similarity Based Auxiliary Classifier for Named Entity Recognition
Shiyuan Xiao | Yuanxin Ouyang | Wenge Rong | Jianxin Yang | Zhang Xiong
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

The segmentation problem is one of the fundamental challenges associated with name entity recognition (NER) tasks that aim to reduce the boundary error when detecting a sequence of entity words. A considerable number of advanced approaches have been proposed and most of them exhibit performance deterioration when entities become longer. Inspired by previous work in which a multi-task strategy is used to solve segmentation problems, we design a similarity based auxiliary classifier (SAC), which can distinguish entity words from non-entity words. Unlike conventional classifiers, SAC uses vectors to indicate tags. Therefore, SAC can calculate the similarities between words and tags, and then compute a weighted sum of the tag vectors, which can be considered a useful feature for NER tasks. Empirical results are used to verify the rationality of the SAC structure and demonstrate the SAC model’s potential in performance improvement against our baseline approaches.

2018

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LSDSCC: a Large Scale Domain-Specific Conversational Corpus for Response Generation with Diversity Oriented Evaluation Metrics
Zhen Xu | Nan Jiang | Bingquan Liu | Wenge Rong | Bowen Wu | Baoxun Wang | Zhuoran Wang | Xiaolong Wang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

It has been proven that automatic conversational agents can be built up using the Endto-End Neural Response Generation (NRG) framework, and such a data-driven methodology requires a large number of dialog pairs for model training and reasonable evaluation metrics for testing. This paper proposes a Large Scale Domain-Specific Conversational Corpus (LSDSCC) composed of high-quality queryresponse pairs extracted from the domainspecific online forum, with thorough preprocessing and cleansing procedures. Also, a testing set, including multiple diverse responses annotated for each query, is constructed, and on this basis, the metrics for measuring the diversity of generated results are further presented. We evaluate the performances of neural dialog models with the widely applied diversity boosting strategies on the proposed dataset. The experimental results have shown that our proposed corpus can be taken as a new benchmark dataset for the NRG task, and the presented metrics are promising to guide the optimization of NRG models by quantifying the diversity of the generated responses reasonably.